Pew Prescription Project

Pew seeks to ensure transparency in physician-industry relationships and promotes policies to reduce or manage conflicts of interest that could affect patient care.

Patients benefit when physicians and researchers collaborate with the private sector to advance the development of effective new drugs and medical devices. However, there is widespread concern that extensive financial relationships between providers and industry, particularly payments associated with product promotion, may unduly influence the care that patients receive.

Such conflicts of interest threaten the integrity of scientific investigations, the objectivity of professional education, the quality of patient care, and the public’s trust in medicine.Institute of Medicine

Direct marketing by the pharmaceutical industry to medical professionals is estimated at $20 to $57 billion each year. A national survey published in the Archives of Internal Medicine found that 84 percent of doctors have some type of financial relationship with the pharmaceutical industry.

Pew’s work in this area seeks to ensure transparency in physician-industry relationships and promotes policies to reduce or manage conflicts of interest that could affect patient care. Our efforts have supported the creation of new policies at medical schools, professional medical associations, and have successfully supported state and federal disclosure laws.

Our Work

WASHINGTON—The Pew Charitable Trusts commended the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services today for the first release of data on its Open Payments website. Authorized by Congress in 2010, the website creates transparency by publicly reporting payments and gifts made by drug companies and medical device manufacturers to physicians and teaching hospitals. Read More

The pharmaceutical industry spent approximately $27 billion in 2012 promoting and marketing its products to physicians. These payments, and those made by the medical device industry, create medical conflicts of interest, which, according to the Institute of Medicine, “threaten the integrity of scientific investigations, the objectivity of professional education, the quality of patient care,... Read More

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